The Original Fascist Posted on August 18, 2020August 18, 2020 https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-original-fascist/ From movement to epithet. To engage in these practices in 1922-26 and in 1933-34, Mussolini and Hitler had to change Italy’s and Germany’s basic laws because, although they controlled the government, they did not yet control society’s commanding heights: the judges, schools, businesses, press, and religious establishment. But because the 21st century’s ruling class has almost a monopoly of all those heights, it does not really need new laws. Having seized the power to make words mean whatever they want, as well as the power to include and exclude from society’s prime places, they are the law.Our ruling class increasingly labels people fascists—but not for doing or saying things other than what they did or said in previous decades. Those who are so labeled have not changed. Indeed, those who call them fascists chastise them for refusing to abandon their ways. Nor has fascism changed. It is one of history’s closed chapters—except for the theory and practice of political economy that it invented and that is now well-nigh universal. Hence, the invidious labeling and the punitive consequences result from a change in those who impose them. We may understand that change as the progressive deformation of liberalismby Angelo M. Codevilla